The Good Old USA Continued

New comprehensive study released May 2009:

Some highlights relevant to this class.

Respondents apparently separate out into 6 categories as shown above. It should not be surprising that "concerned" is the highest category. This is likely due to an overall increase in "awareness" but awareness doesn't necessarily transition into action. Moreover, 50% of Americans are essentially unaware or don't give a shit and 50% of a highly consumptive society still means a lot of GHG emission!

The correlation observed above must obviously exist.

Only the disengaged feel not very well informed - kinda of the defintion of disengaged. Overall, tho, the respondents mostly feel that they are at least adequately to well informed on the issue.

so clearly you can see the debate about anthropogenic causes versus natural climate variations playing out in how people think about the seriousness of global warming. This is not surprising because pretty much everyone is uninformed on both issues - that is , they think they know more about these issues than they actually do.

A real eyeopener here. In all cases less than 10% of the respondents feel that humans can reduce global warming successfully! Losers ....

Most think we could but that we don't know what to do. Bullshit:

• develop terrawatt scale alternative energy electricity generation now
• develop transportion pods that get 100 mpg
• Carbon sequester all emission from coal planets
• Use carbon fiber instead of concrete
• consume less
• drive less

Just because its hard to do these things, doesn't mean we don't know what to do!

Everybody in America is tired of high annual fuel costs ...

Clearly Cap and Trade policy is just too confusing to understand

As said earlier, Awareness does not translate to Action!

This is entirely the piont of your last assignment. Figure out a subversive way to get the message across to the masses that thinking in economic terms will always perpetuate our resource problems and will never provide a solutions. Yeah, all the economists in the world disagree with this but the physicist view of the world knows that climate and energy are shared resources that should never be treated as market commodities.

Well at least scientists are slightly above the media!